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Wednesday, March 19, 2014

TALES FROM THE FRONTIER

CALL IT MY DOUBLE LIFE. Each spring I tuck my passport away
and turn into a blueberry farmer, tending the crop on a 40-acre organic farm in
Maine. Few of my white-collar colleagues know about this side of my life; even
fewer of my fellow farmers have an inkling of my world travels, although at a
recent farmer’s meeting, one old-timer noted, “ For a blueberry farmer, you
sure do come and go a lot.” These two realities felt worlds apart – until now.
In recent years, a steady stream of visitors has been showing up at the farm: A
couple from England with their two son, a Russian grandmother and her daughter,
a family from India, French newlyweds, a band of Brazilian backpackers.

And more keep coming, signaling a travel movement that is
related to the current farm-to-table food fad, but encompasses more. These
travelers are driven by something deeper, seeking to connect with a place in a
more meaningful, experiential way. They spend a day, sometimes several,
immersing themselves in our way of life, fascinated by the ecosystem that
surrounds Maine’s native blueberries, from the wild bees that pollinate the
flowers to the black bears that forage at night to the kestrels that swoop into
the fields by day to snatch a wayward mouse nibbling at the fruit.

This role reversal was strange at first. Instead of being
the curious visitor, I was the attraction, approached by travelers keen to tap
into my life as a villager and eager for an authentic experience. But embracing
these inquisitive wanderers helps keep our farm going. As my 74-year-old
neighbor, Elliot Coleman, puts it, “We’ve never considered ourselves a tourist
attraction, but we could not survive without the people who travel here to see
what we do and buy what we grow, even offering to help with the chroes.” Sure,
visitors have flocked to agricultural outposts before, from Tuscany to Napa,
but the travelers I’m seeing are more purpose driven-happy warriors fighting
for a cause bigger that the farms they visit. As with the global ecotourism
movement that has helped protect nature and save endangered species, the farm
tourism movement today may help revive small family farms around the world.

My own farm is a case in point. In the 1980s, the Herrick
family, who had been farming here for generations, could no longer sustain
their way of life. Like thousands of other small farmers ,they put their land
up for sale. I borrowed $5,000 for a down payment for two of their blueberry
fields, and asked that they teach me to farm the way their forebears
did-without pesticides and herbicides.

There is a satisfying, natural cycle. In the fall, I cover
the fields-Maine’s indigenous low-bush blueberry plants stand only 6 inches
tall when fully grown-in a thick blanket of golden straw. When spring arrive,
family and friends come together and we set the fields on fire-a technique
originally taught to settlers by Native Americans, who have harvested these
berries for centuries. After burning , the plants sprout thick foliage, but no
fruit. The following summer, the same plants flower exuberantly, tripling, even
quadrupling the yield. So we harvest each field every other year, with one
always bearing fruit. By August, ripening plants turn entire landscape into
striking carpets of blue (the setting for Robert McCloskey’s 1948 classic
children’s book, Blueberries fields for
Sal).

We don’t pick the berries; we “rake them-another local
tradition. Using a tool that looks like a steel comb with a handle, we scoop up
the berries, pouring them into flat boxes. Then we blow away any chaff by
emptying the boxes in front of a strong fan. The little bleu gems that remain
are packaged by hand for sale. Harvesting blueberries this way is not a
get-rich-quick scheme, for sure, and until summer vacationers and world
travelers started showing up, we, like so many small farmers, were fighting an
uphill struggle to make it work. But these visitors don’t just buy our blueberries;
they gather around the processing table-sorting, packaging, and learning.

It is more than just a local phenomenon. In Tanabe, Japan, villagers growing
heirloom oranges hope to turn back the tide of rural-to-urban migration that
threaten their thousand-year-old culture by welcoming travelers. Maya communities in Belize have found
new ways to revitalize traditional cacao farming, and visitors learn about the
origins of chocolate. And in Montenegro, with its own blueberry heritage,
travelers and locals gather in the Prokletije
Mountains for the Play Blueberry Festival, which helps sustain the rural
economy.

Last September, more than 50,000 visitors from around the
world attended the Common Ground Country Fair near the town of Unity, a
two-hour drive on meandering roads from my farm. The annual celebration
includes sharing local folklore, sampling favorite dishes, soaking up gardening
techniques, and watching demonstrations from plowing a field with horses to
building a backyard greenhouse. There are evenings of live music and dancing
(save the dates: September 20-22). This new wave of back-to-the-land explores
helps small farms make the leap from a thing of the past into a possibility for
the future-good news for a traveling farmer like me.